JustASC

My brother called me excitedly to say that Rick Warren recited the Shema in his inauguration invocation. Here’s the quote:

Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes form you, it all belongs to you, it all exists for your glory. History is your story. The Scripture tells us, ‘Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’ and you are the compassionate and merciful one and you are loving to everyone you have made.

Technically, he was quoting  Deut. 6-4. I appreciated the Hebraic shout-out, but to me it sounded like a bit of a non sequitur (note the odd transition between what the Scripture tells us followed by “you are the compassionate and merciful one…”).

It didn’t bother me that Warren invoked Jesus in his penultimate paragraph (right before the Lord’s Prayer). It wasn’t as obnoxious as Franklin Graham’s prayer at George W. Bush’s first inaugural, when he prayed  for all Americans to “acknowledge you alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

What Warren said was, “I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life-Yeshua, Esa, Jesus, Jesus-who taught us to pray” the Lord’s Prayer. Warren was speaking personally –”the one who changed my life.” I think it appropriate for any clergy to acknowledge his or her own beliefs, so long as he or she doesn’t presume those beliefs are shared by everybody else.

Steve Waldman had a good piece in the Wall Street Journal on Friday on how the inaugural prayer has gone “from pluralistic to solely Protestant”:

In fact, if one looks at the roster of clergy and the prayers they gave over the past 70 years, it appears that America has actually become less inclusive and pluralistic over time.

Including the two prayers at Barack Obama’s inaugural, 12 prayers will have been delivered at inaugurations since 1989. All of them will have been delivered by Protestants. By contrast, in the previous 48 years, fewer than half of the prayers were offered by Protestants. Every president prior to George H.W. Bush had a Catholic and more than half also had a Jewish or Greek Orthodox clergyman.

IF you’re from New Jersey, are going to the inauguration, and want to talk to a reporter about it, the NJ Jewish News would like to hear from you. Drop a line with contact info to editorial at njjewishnews dot com

Rutgers has suspended its study abroad program in Israel for the spring semester, citing security concerns.

The Orthodox Union sent out a press release this morning announcing that it will conduct a two-month survey of married couples in North America and Israel “to determine the level of marital satisfaction within the community.” To quote from the release:

 The Aleinu Marriage Satisfaction Survey, to be conducted online between January 15-March 31, will be anonymous and take less than ten minutes to complete.

Here’s the flip side to the Keret/Geffen article linked below, from Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: 

“I believe that culpability for these casualties is very much with Hamas. Take this leader, Nizar Rayyan, who was killed with many of his children. He knew he was a target. If I knew that I was a target, I sure as hell wouldn’t have my children near me. It’s a horrible and cynical choice he made. But if your enemy is a sophisticated manipulator of public opinion, then this is one of the many downsides of choosing to go to war. Israel knows that.”

Etgar Keret and his wife Shira Geffen, Israeli writers and filmmakers both, make an appeal to Olmert:

This is just one simple advice from two citizens to the prime minister they did not even vote for: When you write down the various diplomatic and military options available to you, cross out those that pose a risk of wiping out kindergartens. That’s it.

Keep all the other options, weigh them carefully, and choose whatever you see fit. Yet in respect to all the options that may end up killing a double-digit figure of children – take a red pen and cross them out. Even if on the face of it they appear to be promoting our future or our children’s future, or even the future of peace in the Middle East.

Bret Stephens in today’s Wall Street Journal:

It’s easy to understand why so many Palestinians would be keen to join the [Hamas] movement: What comparable form of moral and political transcendence can a little Palestinian state offer? But in choosing Hamas and the fantasy of pan-Islamism over secular Palestinian alternatives, they are also choosing to abandon Palestine itself.

My most recent column is also about pro-Palestinian fantasies:

[Pro-Palestinian protesters] have enacted as enablers in perhaps the most self-defeating national liberation movement in history. Instead of insisting that the Palestinians seize the realistic opportunities offered them, they’ve bolstered the rejectionists’ delusions that they can have it all – not just a state of their own, but a return to their old homes in Israel itself; not just a return to Israel, but a “binational” state that means the end of Zionism. Oh, and Hamas? Hold on to your fantasies of chasing the Jews into the sea. We’ll get to that, sooner or later.

The Times reports that fugitive financier Marc Rich, thanks to money manager J. Ezra Merkin, was a victim of Bernard L. Madoff. Other figures in the story include Merkin’s lawyer, Andrew J. Levander.

Why do all these names sound like something out of a Thomas Pynchon novel?

Strong editorial in the Forward. Gets past the rhetoric that Hamas rockets were a mere “nuisance” to Israelis to show how Hamas was beefing up its arsenal:

Those new rockets are the reason Israel had to go to war when it did. They are the reason that Hamas arms smuggling rose to the top of the cease-fire negotiators’ agenda. They are the reason Egypt was finally forced this month to acknowledge its responsibility for securing its border with Gaza, after years of stonewalling. They are the reason that France and Turkey volunteered to put their troops in harm’s way on the Gaza border, to protect Israel from Hamas terrorism. When push comes to shove, Hamas is the problem, not Israel.

And then there is this reminder:

…[W]hatever the public felt, the civilian deaths didn’t drive the negotiators’ agenda. Civilians make up about 25% of deaths in the Gaza conflict, according to United Nations figures cited in European newspapers. By comparison, civilians make up 67% of the dead in America’s Iraq War and were 80% in Russia’s Chechnya wars. The negotiators knew that.

My colleague Ron Kaplan, on his NJJN sports blog, does great detective work in tracking down the truth behind an anecdote told by former Yankee great Bill “Moose” Skowron a few months back on the NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

It’s funny, but I heard the original broadcast a few months ago and, never having heard of Skowron, thought he might actually have been a fictional character — you know, like Plimpton’s made-up pitcher Sidd Finch or another of those annual NPR April Fools bits.

Well, it turns out that Moose is real enough, but his memopry is a little, shall we say, selective. Writes Ron:

Was Skowron lying or is this just the way he remembers the incident? No one can say for sure, perhaps not even the Moose.

This seems to be the malady of the moment: Telling a story so often that it becomes a memory. Debunked Holocaust memoirist Herman Rosenblat explains his fabrication this way:

“In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.” [Emphasis added.]

And Conversations With God author Neale Donald Walsch has a similar alibi for having passed off as his own work an essay written by someone else:

“I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized … and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”

So can this actually happen? Can our brains really fool us into “misremembering” incidents from our own lives, or internalizing others memories as our own?

And does this mean the guy I drove home from the USY dance was not wearing a penguin suit?